IN recent days, we have been seeing an attempt to slander the teaching profession, ironically just when we were celebrating the international day of teachers. PNP Chief Oscar Albayalde has openly threatened teachers whom he imagines to be teaching rebellious ideas.
At the outset, it is granted that there are indeed people who in the guise of teaching are using their classrooms to openly recruit students to join their preferred advocacies. But in my book, these are no longer teachers but proselytizers and propagandists for a particular cause.
However, a professor who offers a particular angle to understanding history, while at the same time encouraging his or her students to think critically about the material, and form their own questions as well as the manner in which they would look for answers to those questions, is not engaged in propaganda. The professor is in fact being a teacher, in that what he or she is enabling is the ability to think critically, by equipping students with the skills to conduct their own inquiries and form their own conclusions.
Teaching as an art and a science has evolved dramatically, where professors are now no longer seen as sages on the stage but as guides on the side. Learning is no longer based on rote memory, but on functional outcomes. The classroom and the library are no longer just the venues for learning. Technology has enabled the experience of learning in creative ways, that it is laughable that some people would even question why teachers would use movies and the internet as learning devices, and why there should be field or exposure trips. Frankly speaking, it is a bit irritating that people would assume that we teachers should simply be agents of imparting textbook knowledge to students to become pliable and obedient citizens by orating in lecture halls.
It is funny that many people, including Albayalde, would begrudge teachers allegedly indoctrinating their students, when it is not the indoctrination that appears to be problematic to them, but for what side. It is unnerving that people who would question those who allegedly teach their students rebellious ideas, because this is a form of being partisan propagandists, would at the same time prefer that teachers inculcate blind patriotism and uncritical loyalty to a country, and teach students that our country’s interests are necessarily juxtaposed with those of its leaders.
Indeed, teachers should never be propagandists, not for the left, and certainly not for the state and the establishment. A professor who actively teaches the leftist ideologies of Marx and Mao to convert students to become communist rebels is as wrong as one who lambasts Marx and Mao to convert students to blindly hate leftist ideology and turn them into become right-wing, pro-establishment ideologues.
Teaching, for all intents and purposes, is always a rebellious endeavor. After all, to educate is to open the eyes of the young to the realities of the world. It is a noble act of enabling and empowering students to become active agents for their own learning and transformation, so that they can also transform the world. Educating means equipping students with the ability to think critically, and to see the world beyond the myths, lies and dead dogmas. To educate means to engage in a teaching and learning moment where the end product is not just the acquisition of a skill, but also of a worldview that inquires and seeks reasoned conclusions. To educate is not to entrench in the minds of students a particular narrative, but the capacity to analyze, inquire, and form conclusions about dominant and competing narratives.
Hence, teaching martial law by showing video documentaries about it is not necessarily propaganda if the teacher is conscious that what is being presented is just one view, albeit dominant, of a complex period of our history. Students are encouraged to raise their own critical questions about the narrative, and are directed to look for other sources that may provide different perspectives as evidence to help them form their own conclusions.
Teachers are allowed to have their biases, provided that they disclose these and do not impose them on their students.
But granted that there are teachers who violate these tenets, their sins of omission and commission must be dealt with as transgressions of the ethical standards of teaching, and not as criminal offenses, unless the teacher openly espouses political violence and uses student’s adherence to it and actual involvement in it as an academic requirement to pass the course.
I teach political violence as a course. I therefore teach theories on revolutions and terrorism, and I require my students to critically look into these theories as a lens to understand why revolutions and terrorism happen, particularly on their social and political roots. In a course on political theory, and to help my students understand the dynamics of revolutionary theory, particularly on the causes, consequences, and pitfalls of revolutions, I require them to plan a hypothetical revolution using current Philippine realities. In teaching, we call this authentic learning. We do not simply run a pencil and paper test with true or false or multiple-choice questions to gauge how deep or how extensively my students have memorized my lecture and their reading materials. I am in fact asking them to simulate a revolution in their minds so that they can have a deeper understanding of its possible consequences.
But at another time, and in contrast, and to help them appreciate theories of democracy and its associated reformist politics, I then ask them to formulate another plan to simulate a blueprint for reform using policies and governance mechanisms to address the prevailing problems in our society. In doing so, I enable them to understand the difference between reform and revolution, and to make them appreciate their respective limitations.
There are two dimensions to teaching. One is educating, and the other is training. Universities and colleges are not mere training institutes. We do not have trainees but students. We are professors and not trainers. We do not simply transfer skills that are specific, regimented and hierarchical, such as for those who undergo military and police training.
While both educational and training institutes are designed to produce citizens equipped with knowledge and skills to serve the people, we whose main job it is to educate and not just to train do it not only because we want to teach minds, but also to touch hearts and transform lives.
And we can only do this if we rebel against dogmatic thinking. We do not rebel against the state, but against the state of things where truth surrenders to power, whether dominant or not.
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